Many an aeon moulded earth before her highest, man, was born, Many an aeon too may pass when earth is manless and forlorn, Earth so huge and yet so bounded — pools of salt and plots of land — Shallow skin of green and azure — chains of mountains, grains of sand!
Alfred Tennyson's Poetical Works, Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After, Stanza 103, Oxford University Press, Inc. 1953
